Dictionary of Literary Biography on Adrienne (Cecile) Rich

Adrienne Rich is one of the foremost feminist theorists of our time. Her work spans more than thirty years of her adult life, beginning in 1951 when she graduated from Radcliffe College and won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World (1951). Rich resists the stasis and security of separating her work according to conventional generic categories. The value of her writing, in any form, is that it represents a thoughtful response to these decades of momentous change for women, American intellectuals, and literary critics. In particular, Rich's works to date, paralleling changes in her own life, explore the figuration of woman in various familiar positions along a continuum of possibilities: heterosexual lover, wife, mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, lesbian lover, U.S. citizen. The splendor of her writing is the result of her kaleidoscopic positioning and repositioning as thinking, feeling, and writing subject. The trajectory...